Rachel Sennott played double duty on the set of “I Love LA” as the showrunner and No. 1 on the call sheet which meant a lot of time was spent planning her own sex scenes.
One bizarre aspect of shooting the HBO series she didn’t expect was her relationship with the intimacy coordinator. The series opens with a sex scene between Sennott’s Maia and her on-screen boyfriend Dylan, played by Josh Hutcherson.
Because Sennott led the writers’ room for the series, she was calculated about each depiction of on-screen nudity, making sure they were not gratuitous. For that reason she found her conversations with the intimacy coordinator funny at times.
“It was really funny to me on this specific show. We of course had an intimacy coordinator,” she said on Monday’s episode of “Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend.” “I would have the conversation with her as the showrunner, and she would be like ‘totally,’ and then she’d call me thirty minutes later and be like, ‘So this is what they’re thinking.’”
Sennott said wearing multiple hats in this setting was just “funny and sort of bizarre.”
“‘You tell me what you feel comfortable with,’” she said, imitating the intimacy coordinator detailing a blow-job scene from the script. “I’m like I wrote that. What?”
O’Brien and his co-hosts laughed off the notion, as the “I Love LA” creator emphasized of course she was comfortable with the scenes because she was the one who wrote them.
The “Bottoms” star also told O’Brien that she wanted each sex scene to serve a purpose. O’Brien commended the 30-year-old for depicting the “familiarity and utilitarian” nature of sex in a committed relationship, even if it’s not glamorous.
“For me, sex, if you’re going to show it in a show or movie, it should be funny. It should tell you something about the relationship,” she said.
“It was not in any way gratuitous. It was funny, and it was telling me right away how your character’s funny,” O’Brien told the actress. “It was not just ‘we open on sex scene, so we can get the viewers in.’”
Watch the full episode of “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” here:
“I Love LA” airs weekly on Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on HBO Max.
